Mokhtar Belmokhtar, reportedly shown here in a video obtained by Mauritanian news agency ANI, has become a symbol of how the United States bungled an ambitious, long-term strategy to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in North and West Africa. (AFP/Getty Images)

The U.S. military was closely tracking a one-eyed bandit across the Sahara in 2003 when it confronted a hard choice that is still reverberating a decade later. Should it try to kill or capture the target, an Algerian jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, or let him go?

Belmokhtar had trained at militant camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s, returned home to join a bloody revolt and was about to be blacklisted by the United Nations for supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But he hadn’t yet attacked Americans and did not appear to pose a threat outside his nomadic range in the badlands of northern Mali and southern Algeria.

U.S. military commanders planned airstrikes against Belmokhtar and a band of Arab militants they had under surveillance in the Malian desert, according to three current and former American officials familiar with the episode. But the U.S. ambassador to Mali at the time vetoed the plan, saying a strike was too risky and could stir a backlash against Americans.

Since then, Belmokhtar has gradually helped build an al-Qaeda-branded network while expanding his exploits as a serial kidnapper, smuggler and arms dealer. Last month, his group, Signatories in Blood, took dozens of people hostage at a natural gas complex in Algeria. At least 37 foreign captives were killed, including three Americans.

In addition to raising his global profile, the attack turned Belmokhtar into a symbol of how the United States over the past 10 years has bungled an ambitious strategy to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in North and West Africa.

(The Washington Post)

The U.S. government has invested heavily in counterterrorism programs in the region, spending more than $1 billion since 2005 to train security forces, secure borders, promote democracy, reduce poverty and spread propaganda.

The strategy was portrayed as a sobering lesson from the costly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The goal of stabilizing weak African countries was to keep al-Qaeda out and obviate the need to send U.S. combat forces into the Sahara.

Despite those efforts, Belmokhtar’s group and a hazy array of other jihadist factions and rebellious tribesmen seized control of northern Mali last year. In March, a U.S.-trained Malian officer carried out a coup, further plunging the country into chaos.

“We had this great program, and we put hundreds of millions of dollars into it, and it failed. Why did it fail?” said a member of the U.S. Special Operations forces who worked in Africa until he retired last year. “Fundamentally, we missed the boat.”

Todd Moss, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 2007 to 2008, blamed “a wholly inadequate policy response.” He said U.S. officials placed their faith in a flawed model to promote development and build institutions, especially in northern Mali, a Texas-size territory with little government presence.

“There was no consensus on the size or seriousness of the threat,” Moss added. “We were looking through both civilian and military rose-colored glasses. And that should give us pause as we try to figure out how to move forward.”

‘He was well within reach’

By 2003, U.S. officials were becoming alarmed about the potential for Islamist extremists to establish a haven in North or West Africa.

Among them was a former paratrooper known as Abderrazak al-Para, who kidnapped 32 Europeans and collected $6 million in ransom.

The kidnapping did not involve any American hostages, but it drew the attention of commanders at the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.Using satellite imagery and other sources, the U.S. military tracked al-Para and shared the intelligence with African governments, which pursued him across the desert. After an epic chase, he was captured in Chad.

Around the same time, the U.S. military also started to track Belmokhtar and floated a plan to fire missiles at an Arab militant camp in northern Mali. Vicki Huddleston, the U.S. ambassador to Mali at the time, said she blocked the operation. It was unclear whether Belmokhtar was actually present at the camp, she recalled in an interview, adding that he was considered a minor figure.

“I said no. First, you don’t know who these people are, and second, it’s a bad idea,” she said. “We had a big fight over this.”

The four-star Air Force general in charge of the operation, Charles F. Wald, who has since retired, acknowledged that he wanted to capture Belmokhtar but insisted that airstrikes were not a serious option. He said that the U.S. military wanted to share intelligence and gear with Algeria and Mali so they could arrest or kill Belmokhtar but that civilian U.S. leaders refused. “The answer at that time was, ‘Not our business,’ ” he said.

Wald is still angry at what he sees as a missed opportunity, saying the military had “about a thousand” chances to get the bandit. “We allowed Belmokhtar to become larger than life,” the general said in an interview. “He was well within reach,” he added. “It would have been easy.”

Ten years later, Wald and the ambassador still disagree about whether they should have seized that chance to eliminate Belmokhtar. But they concur that the dispute foreshadowed flaws in the forthcoming U.S. strategy to prevent al-Qaeda from planting roots in the region.

“I’m really frustrated right now because I think we blew it,” Wald said, speaking in general about U.S. counterterrorism policy in Africa. “We’ve gone backwards, frankly.”

President Obama later appointed Huddleston as the top Africa policy official in the Pentagon, where she earned a reputation among her former diplomatic colleagues as a zealous hawk on security matters.

She said the U.S. government never overcame divisions over how aggressively it should respond to the emergence of al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate. The Pentagon was often too eager to take direct military action, she added, while the State Department was too willing to tolerate al-Qaeda’s presence.

“The issue has come up again and again,” said Huddleston, who retired from the Pentagon at the end of 2011. “The Defense Department wanted to help the countries in the region to confront the threat, and State wanted to contain.”

Signs of trouble in Mali

The failure to keep Islamist extremists from taking over northern Mali was not because of lack of money or attention from Washington.

In 2005, the U.S. government started the Trans-Sahara Counter­terrorism Partnership — an innovative, $1 billion collection of programs designed to prevent the spread of radicalism. It delivered humanitarian aid and security assistance to 10 countries in North and West Africa, drawing on the combined resources of the military, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The partnership was dogged by problems from the outset, however, as U.S. agencies squabbled internally and struggled to understand an unfamiliar cultural and political terrain.

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration created a separate Africa Command to oversee military activity on the continent, fuel­ing fears among Africans that the United States was militarizing its foreign policy and looking to construct new bases. Facing a backlash, the Pentagon was forced to call off its search for an Africa headquarters for the command. It remained in Germany, instead.

The new command was largely a paper institution, with no regular troops assigned to it. Wald, the retired general, said the whole approach was misguided.

“The Africans didn’t want us there in the first place, so they started out behind the power curve to start with,” he said. “We can’t lead them around condescendingly.”

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon, State Department and USAID for lacking a “comprehensive, integrated strategy” for the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership. The investigative arm of Congress found that the agencies did not collaborate well and could not measure whether the aid was doing any good.

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the $1 billion Sahara counter­terrorism strategy, acknowledged that it was difficult to measure the program’s effectiveness. “To be very honest with you, we’re not very good at quantifying it,” the official said.

The program focused heavily on Mali, a landlocked, famine-prone country that American officials worried was vulnerable to Islamist extremists coming south from Algeria.

In 2009, after a graduation ceremony for one ETIA unit that had received five weeks of instruction from U.S. troops, the ambassador to Mali at the time, Gillian Milovanovic, expressed shock at the bedraggled appearance of the Malian soldiers.

In a classified diplomatic cable later made public by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, Milovanovic described how a U.S. Army captain introduced her to “one, rather unimpressive soldier, an older, rail thin man with a scraggly beard and bloodshot eyes who had been lounging against a motorbike in a dirty T-shirt inside a warehouse. [The captain] explained that in spite of appearances, this was one of the ETIA’s best men, noting that he had been one of the few survivors of a July 4 ambush of a Malian Army patrol by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”

The ambassador also observed how the Malians were poorly clothed and equipped, even though the U.S. government had bought boots, desert fatigues, radios and Toyota Land Cruisers for the entire 160-man unit.

Many of the soldiers were black-skinned Malians from the south who had little familiarity with the Arab and Tuareg tribes that populate the north. In hindsight, U.S. officials said, they should have recognized that the black troops would clash with the Tuaregs, who have a long history of grievances against the Malian central government, instead of al-Qaeda. But few of the U.S. Special Forces instructors were conversant in local culture or native languages, and they didn’t pick up the cues.

“That’s the key ingredient that was always missing in this and is only now coming to light — would they really fight?” said Rudolph Atallah, director of Africa counter­terrorism programs at the Pentagon from 2003 to 2009. “There was no thought about taking the cultural piece a little bit deeper.”

There were also clear signs that the Malian government had little interest in fighting al-Qaeda. Suspicions abounded among U.S. officials and other diplomats that Malian leaders were pocketing a portion of the ransoms that Belmokhtar and other jihadists collected from their kidnapping schemes.

“We made a big effort to build the political will in Mali, and it never succeeded,” said a senior Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They always told us what they thought we wanted to hear, but they never followed it up with actions.”

A turn for the worse

The U.S. strategy for the region began to fall apart in 2008.

Military leaders in Mauritania and Niger — two countries that bookend Mali — toppled their governments in coups, forcing the Pentagon to cut off military training.

That left the United States more dependent on Mali to spearhead its anti-terrorism programs, even as it was becoming clear that Malian troops weren’t up to the task.

“It was an awful, stupid strategy we had by then,” Huddleston said. “You obviously couldn’t fight terrorism with one weak army that didn’t want to fight in the north.”

The Obama administration made things tougher by restricting intelligence-sharing with France and Algeria, key allies against al-Qaeda, according to former U.S. officials.

American military officers chafed at the restrictions but often failed to earn the trust of U.S. ambassadors in the region, said the former Special Operations forces member.

“Quite frankly, we weren’t used to dealing with the Department of State and other agencies,” he said. “When we get on the ground, they run the show, and that’s what we struggled with.”

By 2011, Mali’s security was visibly deteriorating as Tuareg mercenaries and Islamist extremists flooded into the north and domestic political strife came to a boil. After the March coup, Washington severed all security aid to the Malian military.

Even now, disagreement persists inside the Obama administration over whether the threat posed by Belmokhtar and other al-Qaeda loyalists in northern Mali warrants a more forceful response by the U.S. military. The White House has ruled out sending combat troops to Mali, but the Pentagon is making plans for a Predator drone base next door.

“Nobody’s arguing that they should be left unmolested,” the senior State Department official said. “But if they’re stuck in the middle of Mali’s northern mountains, that in itself doesn’t matter.”

Craig Whitlock covers the Pentagon and national security. He has reported for The Washington Post since 1998.

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